297: Day-to-Day Design Struggles

This week, we take a break from talking about high-level design problems and dive into the specific struggles we find ourselves running into lately, including pushing through the last ten percent, maintaining multiple realities, gaining stakeholder buy-in, and designing around moving targets. And as always, we share a couple cool things like a science-fiction page-turner and a thought-provoking video series.

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Follow-up:

The Book of Mormon is a hilariously irreverent Broadway musical from the creators of South Park
Here are the full lyrics for the Design Details rap:

Designers in tech, you can spot em from afar

They all wear the same clothes, and don't drive cars

They all go on hikes, most ride bikes

And if you hit the dating apps, they look alike

They talk about some big ideas, and use language

Like "design is a tool we'll all use to save the planet"

Then they go back to their desk (standing)

Tweak a couple pixels, cause their job is so demanding

Text a designer? The message is blue

Meet a designer? They probably got a beard, too

See a designer? They're usually white

I'm talking pale-ass motherfucker, blindingly bright

They often have the best intentions, but the truth is

They're just another cog in a machine that is ruthless

Cause if you give a guy a KPI

They're gonna push retention till society dies

We're all different, we think different

All of us uniquely happen to think different

Skeuomorphism is dead, I'm insisting

It's all about that flat design now, listen

On Design Details

Brian and Marshall yell

Industry Talk:

It's tedious to push through the last 10% of a project
The heat death of the universe is "an idea of an ultimate fate of the universe in which the universe has evolved to a state of no thermodynamic free energy and therefore can no longer sustain processes that increase entropy"
Video [GoT Spoilers!]: "Not today" is what we say to the God of Rough Edges
GIF: Shame
Maintaining multiple realities in one's head can be difficult
MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product, or "a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and provide feedback for future product development"
Ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag is an idiom meant to describe anything that is overfull or a situation that is undesirable
Playlist: "Framer Feature Announcements" do a great job of creating excitement around prototyping features
Gaining stakeholder buy-in and design for others' surfaces can be tricky with a lot of stakeholders and in-progress roadmaps
Design-by-committee is "a disparaging term for a project that has many designers involved but no unifying plan or vision"
Headcanon is "an interpretation of a fictional universe accepted by an individual fan, but not necessarily found within or supported by the official canon"
Forcing functions are "any task, activity or event that forces you to take action and produce a result"

One Cool Thing:

Brian shared Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, "a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and intimate, mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human"
Marshall shared the Spectrum series by Jubilee, a playlist of videos "revealing the spectrum of beliefs within a specific group"

Design Details on the Web:

We are @designdetailsfm

Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]
Marshall is @marshallbock
@Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are

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BYEEEEE!